“Thanks,” I said, taking the dress, the old cotton supple and soft. I didn’t bother to tell her that I was planning on staying away from handsome boys for a while. “It’s been really nice talking to you, Mil. I hope … Would it be okay if I came back later this week? I’d love to talk more, and maybe look at the paintings again.”
“I would love that,” she said.
As I crossed the street back home, I felt a familiar hum in my nerves—one that reminded me of sitting in my first art history course freshman year, watching slides of paintings click by, color-struck, nearly twitching with excitement. I tried to recall all of the portraits one by one. The man with the tattered ears and slack jaw who operated the roller coaster out on Steel Pier, a cigarette pinched in his fingers. The woman with a flower pinned to her lapel and a piece of yellow carbon paper crumpled tight in her hand. The man with a prosthetic arm from the elbow down, the way the artist had emphasized the mechanical gleam of it in the light.
This painter wanted people at their weakest or their greediest or their most pandering selves. I wondered how I could find outmore, if that swooping S in the signature gave me enough information to start with.Here, I thought. Here is where everything changes, the upswing. This is when I start inching my way back to who I’m supposed to be.
IN CONTRASTto the buzz of excitement about the paintings, my shifts at the spa had been brutally dull. I had forgotten the reality of service jobs: the stretches of hours spent both waiting for something to happen, for customers to serve, and also hoping that you wouldn’t have to do anything at all. Or the exhaustion of having to be subservient to the customers who did come in, the brutal self-effacement it involved.Yes ma’am, of course, sir, please, allow me. My pleasure my pleasure oh no it’s really my pleasure.
By the end of every shift, I felt numb and empty. On my way out I often stopped at the bar, exhausted, ordering a drink or two because it felt like something to do, because it felt good to be the one who was waited on, who got to make requests. Then, walking lazily through the rows of slot machines while I waited for the drifty, buzzed feeling to wear off, I watched men in VFW hats and women wearing fanny packs that bulged like exterior organs smoke Marlboro reds and sigh at their bad luck.
I saw the prostitute with the peach tattoo every now and then: sucking on an ice cube at the bar, crossing and recrossing her legs every time a man walked by, then relaxing into a slouch when he looked away. Rubbing her eyes as she sat on the curb waiting for the jitney, her stilettos in her hands. Once I walked past her in the hallway near the Guest Rewards lobby. I braced myself for her to mock me again, but when she saw me staring she just frowned, then reached into her pocket for a packet of Sweet’N Low, tipped her head back, and shook it into her mouth. She always wore the same style dress, and I could usually see the stem and the leaf of the tattoo peeking above the fabric. Once she had styled her hairin a dramatic swoop over her face, but when she turned I could see that underneath it she had a black eye.
Clara didn’t come back to the spa until my sixth week there, early in the morning, while I was alone at the desk. She wore a purple bandana tied around her head and a matching purple halter top, a belly button ring with a dangling charm in the shape of a flower that glinted and jiggled as she walked.
“Good morning, lovely.” No sign of the worried girl I had left behind in the shop. She made it look so easy—smoothing over the rough parts of her life. “How have you been lately?” There was a bemused curl to her lips that suggested she knew the way I had fallen apart on the boardwalk as soon as I’d walked out of her door.
“What did you do to me?” I asked, leaning toward her so that I could whisper. Speaking with her about her gift, as she had called it, made me feel insane.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, but you sound crazy. Do you mean the reading?”
“Shh! Yes … you … you did something to me.” Maybe she had been angry about what I had seen. I understood that—the desire to punish anyone who witnessed your pain. Hadn’t I done the same to people who had known me here, after Steffanie died? If only for a moment, to make yourself feel as though you weren’t so weak.
“Like what?” She smirked. “A hex? A curse? You broke a nail?”
“No, I …” I thought about trying to explain to Clara what I’d felt on the boardwalk. Like I was in the grip of a vise, the light-headedness, the breathlessness, the wild, jostling thing that was my heart. Eventually a woman had come out of one of the nearby souvenir shops and offered me a cup of water. It had helped, not so much the water, but feeling seen, her hand tentative and gentle on my back. “Never mind, okay. Why are you here?”
“I want to use the spa.”
“Clara, you know I’ve been warned not to let you back there.”
“I’m a paying customer.” She wiggled her fingers into the pockets of her shorts and produced a crumpled fifty-dollar bill.
“Doesn’t matter. Number one, I don’t think you’re even eighteen years old yet. Number two, even if you pay, I’m not supposed to let you in. Emily said you stole the hair dryer the last time you got back there.”
“How would I do that? They are screwed into the wall.”
“She said your nails were bleeding when you left.”
She shrugged.
“Would you please stop doing that?” I asked.
“What?”
“Shrugging like that. Like you have no idea what’s going on, what anyone is talking about. What you’re doing … you know everything. I don’t know how, but you do.”
Out of the corner of my eye I could see a trio of women coming down the hall, Swarovski shopping bags slung over their arms. I guessed that they were a 10:00 appointment, and Emily would be in any minute. I believed in Clara, but I didn’t want Emily to see that I did—Emily, who found it so easy to shoo her away like a fly. She would think I was stupid, weak.
“Please go, Clara.”
She sighed. “You should let your hair down. Literally. You look like a librarian.” I winced. Matthew had always liked when I looked a little stern. Or rather he liked undoing it—pulling my hair out of a bun, stripping me out of my pencil skirts. With Matthew, my seriousness had made me feel important, like I could anchor his more impulsive, erratic qualities. The unpredictable schedule. The disregard for paperwork, his lack of interest in grocery shopping, of simply making sure there was milk for the coffee and bread for the toast and soap for the shower. There were times when I resented it, a little bit, but he could always sense that. He had a habit of naming my poses as though I werea sculpture he had made:Lily Chopping Onions. Lily Scrubbing. Lily, Arms Crossed. Some of my anger would unravel then, but I wished now that it hadn’t. Maybe that anger would have protected me.
“Thanks for the fashion advice. Now, please go.” But she didn’t budge. She seemed to be weighing something in me, measuring me, and it made me uneasy.
“Okay, I’ll leave you alone, but I want to talk to you about something first.”
“Me? About what?” I had the feeling she was going to ask me for money or for a favor that could make me lose this stupid job.
